I just read the blue's posts in the resto section of fluid druid home page. One part in particular really baffled me:

In our minds, the Lich King Feral rotation was too complex. We think we made it too simple in Cataclysm. The change is intended to strike a balance between the two.

Now...I only really did cat in WotLK in 25M raids, cause I tanked our 10m. However, I was always in the top 3 DPS (usually top on saurafang, or w/e his name was, the tank & spank for melee). I only did maybe 2-3 10M raid weeks in cata DS as cat (until I had to switch back to tank so we could progress), and that did seem easy, and I was at or near the top with no reading or catching up on things.

I started tanking in MoP but we changed roles cause everybody was doing the same thing for 2-3 years, and we were getting bored. So... at first I just did the basic stuff we did in wrath...keep SR up, keep rip and rake up, use your 2 CDs, etc. And my DPS was horrible, so bad that after that first week I almost forced the monk to go DPS and I was gonna go back to tanking. Luckily I found you guys and got it straightened out and am still improving. But that's just it. It's been a month, and I play a lot (of course we only raid 2x / week) but I do LFRs, sit on dummys, etc. I still am far from mastering it, and still 2-3k behind my sim on a tank & spank like Feng / Garagal(?) if you don't enter spirit realm.

Is this blue post ridiculous to anybody else? Or was I just away that long that the rotation is just ridiculous now? It seems like entire WotLK rotation being perfect is only the very starting building block for MoP rotation. Now we weave in HTs, and NS/HT for rip, and haste no longer affects bleeds, so energy regen is much more of a concern than WotLK. Please either someone tell me I'm crazy, or tell me this blue is lying to us. Because it's been a month - 1.5 months and I still have trouble perfecting the rotation.

I think that was the justification for changing SR back to applying to all damage and not just white attacks. I don't think they took into account the impact of our talents on our rotation, and it is clearly more complicated than past expansions. We also have more sophisticated tools now, so we can deal with the complexity, but at the cost of making it difficult, if not impossible, to execute something close to an optimum rotation without the tools.

It was the second of 2 responses Ferals recieved through out the whole beta. It was in response to 2 months of us posting wanting to know why SR was being reverted. The entire explination was longer then the above quote, but it did boil down to just what the quote says.

Feral ended up recieving close to if not the fewest changes of any class (restos are pretty close here). We ended up having more abilities removed from our toolbox then added. Like Leaf said we were not given a very deep look at what the changes (and lack of changes) would do to our rotation.

In short, our rotation is by far the hardest to use, and the most punishing for mistakes. I do think that Ghostcrawler (the author of that post) was being honest. They were trying to find a balance. However it was done half assed with out a real good look at the repercussions.

To be fair (imo) Wrath cat dps wasn't really that hard. The hardest part was understanding armor penetration, but I digress. Bringing SR back, from a PvE sense, makes absolutely no difference for me. The irony is what Tinder posted: they ended up making it harder and more punishing with DoC even though their intent was to bring it somewhere in between. And again, I'm okay with it. I still contend that using HT is clunky and there are other things that could have been done, but oh well.

My biggest issue is on the PvP side. If you mess up SR you are losing a huge amount of damage (and not only that, you are losing out on the potential to use combo points on things like maim/FB). No class really has this punishing of a mechanic. If you are trying to get a rip off before your SR runs out and you get CC'ed you run the risk of SR falling off before you have a chance to put up your rip. If that happens you have to redo and use an SR then start building combo points all over again (unless you want a painfully weak rip up). It's too brutal when you lose control of your character so often.

Wrath had 9-second rake, 12-second mangle, and a savage roar that lasted 4-8 seconds shorter than it does now. It had less energy regeneration, with the absence of SotF and haste not affecting energy regeneration. Shred cost 42 energy. Ferocious Bite cost 35-70 energy and had to be used at low energy due to the poor energy-to-damage conversion of the extra energy.

The only thing that's harder about the rotation now is Dream of Cenarius. Edit: and thrash.

We had crit ratings of 50% by the end of the first tier, and 78% by the end of ICC. Combo points came a lot faster then now. By ICC Ferals Mangle was 30 seconds long, and if you had another Feral, Guardian, or Arms Warrior you didn't even have to use it. Also bleeds didn't do nearly as much of our damage as they do now. ArP made Shred and White attacks much more importnet. You still needed high bleed uptime to do the most damage, but totally different thing now.

Now the other side is that Feral was in total flux for most the expantion. The only tier that didn't have big changes for Ferals was T9 which was short and everyone hated anyway. It was a hard class to play and almost no one did.

The big thing though is the rotation itself both then and now isn't really that hard. It is however VERY unforgiving. Making a mistake causes setbacks that can cascade with further mistakes. The mistakes are just different now, but just as punishing. The other side is we have a lot more new people raiding then in WotLK and wanting to try Feral. It is really in accessable to new people. It sucks now like it sucked then in that respect.

I love the complexity of it, makes you feel good when you can top the charts, but I agree, I don't think you could start playing now and pick it up without a TON of practice. I started explaining it to a friend who was gonna play his 85 druid as feral, and I only covered about 4 spells, SR, Rake, Rip and Tiger's Fury, and he gave up lol. Granted, he always played DK and Mage (now he's our monk tank) and not a slacker in DPS by any means (he was always my main competition in Nax & ICC 25man).

HT is very clunky, it's very nice to do the 120k spot heals to let healers focus more on the tanks. And after thinking about the changes, it's not really different all than WotLK except DoC and thrash, as mentioned above. My rotation is exactly the same, replacing mangle with faerie fire, and adding in the heals. Perhaps what makes ferals tougher in a general sense is they are also responsible for filling healers mana on 3m CD, spot healing the raid, and using that weak tranq that everyone loves to call for. Oh, and also on brez duty, which sucks cause if it's the wrong time, all your dots fall off >.<

On a brighter note, tonight I matched my Sim, and went over by 1-2k on a couple fights, and rank top 100 (in normal blegh) 10mans. So, I'm getting the hang of it, but my outlook is it's about 2-3x harder than WotLK because everything's basically the same + adding DoC & Thrash. Feral can be tougher than the majority of classes (save shamans, boomkins, and could even throw in spriests) in the regards of performing other roles than strict DPS. All the while you're expected to stay on top of the DPS charts.

However, I do thank everyone for their continued input & discussions so that we can learn as a community, and perform better than our (now) #19 DPS spec in the latest SimC report!

Instaqueues wrote:I love the complexity of it, makes you feel good when you can top the charts, but I agree, I don't think you could start playing now and pick it up without a TON of practice. I started explaining it to a friend who was gonna play his 85 druid as feral, and I only covered about 4 spells, SR, Rake, Rip and Tiger's Fury, and he gave up lol. Granted, he always played DK and Mage (now he's our monk tank) and not a slacker in DPS by any means (he was always my main competition in Nax & ICC 25man).

HT is very clunky, it's very nice to do the 120k spot heals to let healers focus more on the tanks. And after thinking about the changes, it's not really different all than WotLK except DoC and thrash, as mentioned above. My rotation is exactly the same, replacing mangle with faerie fire, and adding in the heals. Perhaps what makes ferals tougher in a general sense is they are also responsible for filling healers mana on 3m CD, spot healing the raid, and using that weak tranq that everyone loves to call for. Oh, and also on brez duty, which sucks cause if it's the wrong time, all your dots fall off >.<

On a brighter note, tonight I matched my Sim, and went over by 1-2k on a couple fights, and rank top 100 (in normal blegh) 10mans. So, I'm getting the hang of it, but my outlook is it's about 2-3x harder than WotLK because everything's basically the same + adding DoC & Thrash. Feral can be tougher than the majority of classes (save shamans, boomkins, and could even throw in spriests) in the regards of performing other roles than strict DPS. All the while you're expected to stay on top of the DPS charts.

However, I do thank everyone for their continued input & discussions so that we can learn as a community, and perform better than our (now) #19 DPS spec in the latest SimC report!

I believe the biggest problem at the moment is the disproportional amount of "stress" caused by different dps stages - imagine that dps classes fall in either a "marathon" or "sprint" category then feral druids would fall into a marathon with a sprint every 40-50 seconds (pull, CD's, buff desync). As Tinder already mentioned, by far the biggest issue is the panic caused when missing out on dps during the pull (potion), cooldown uptime (berserk+tf) and the 25% + potion (optional) part. The latter here is most detrimental to our success or failure, if you miss a full-buff + potion rip near 25% it's gone, there's nothing you can do about it. Same goes for the pull. On top of this, you still need to play perfectly (even if you messed up potions) to be competitive, otherwise you'll just hit rock bottom (granted, it's easier with aoe/hotw).

Add to this the (unintended) non-linearity of our GCD's now (ie. NS if off the GCD, HT and Vortex trigger 1.5 - modified by haste, everything else is 1.0) and the tedious weapon swaps for HotW and fault-tolerance becomes nigh nonexistent.

On top of that, there's also the issue with the current raid tier where there's certain item upgrades which far out-pace any alternatives (weapons & trinkets, I mean you - Elegon!). If you just never have them drop you lose far more dps than raiding with some blues gloves.

They took mangle out, but added weakened blows, so yeah, its 2-3x longer debuff, but it's still something to watch for. I'm getting used to it, but thought I'd make sure it wasn't just me that thought it was complicated. Tired of hearing people say their class/spec is the most unforgiving and the most intricate rotation. I just tell them they're all hard until you can do it in your sleep! (except arcane mages)

On a positive note, as our crit increase through MoP, the rotation will hopefully become a little less forgiving due to increase combo point generation. This was the big thing that made the WOTLK rotation bearable - you could usually get 5 combo ponts from just 3 attacks.

This should mean less and less difficulty keeping SR & Rip up which I find particularly punishing at present.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the next tier. Tanking was horrendous this tier, since bears need to be hit/exp capped, and it just leaves minimal room for avoidance.

Same with hit/exp on a cat, leaving little room for crit! That, and haste will be higher naturally, so we'll have more energy...I suspect we'll be at least in the top 10 by mid-late next tier. Then they'll either nerf us, or we'll skyrocket past any other dps, cause we're cats..and that's what we do